Many local governments, especially in smaller towns and rural areas, face difficult climate resilience challenges with few financial resources or help from state or federal government. Climate resilience planning can be intimidating and overwhelming.

To help these communities, we spent the last 20 months developing our new Climate Ready Communities program to get high quality, affordable help into the hands of local governments and community associations that are working to build climate resilience.

The Climate Ready Communities program includes a free, downloadable, Practical Guide to Climate Resilience Planning. This Guide is based on our 10 years of experience helping communities understand and adapt to changing climate conditions, and the proven framework – Whole Community Resilience – that our team developed during this time.

This framework uses a cross-sector, multi-stakeholder approach that is adaptive over time and creates multiple benefits across the community. Using this framework, communities develop strategies that are ecologically sound and socially equitable while building local capacity to adapt as conditions continue to change.

In addition to the free Guide, local governments can get personalized support as they move through the 7 steps in the Guide through our affordably priced annual subscription service. And for communities that want additional support, whether or not they are a subscriber, the Climate Ready Communities program offers a series of add-on services, including blocks of one-on-one consulting time, local climate projections, and workshop facilitation.

The goal is for these communities to do what they can themselves while quickly getting any help they need throughout the process of climate resilience planning and implementation.

We have been working with community leaders across the country to test and refine the program and have just launched the pilot phase with 8 communities in Minnesota, South Carolina, Iowa, California, Texas, Colorado, Maine, and the Sierras. Pilot communities receive an extra three hours of consulting at no extra charge.

A limited number of slots are still available in the pilot program on a first-come, first-served basis. For information about this program and to download the free guide, visit www.climatereadycommunities.org.

We will do a full commercial launch of the program late this year so watch for that announcement!